Freescale teamed with UI Centric on an Android-based medical user interface, with Stonestreet One on Bluetooth technology, with QNX on medical user interfaces, and with Microsoft on connecting through the cloud to the Microsoft HealthVault. The HealthVault is a Web-based platform of individuals' health and fitness information.

"If you have a wireless medical device, this will connect to it," Niewolny asserts.

He says the gateway serves as a focal point for computing platforms and medical devices. On the computing platform side, it connects to a PC, tablet computer, or smartphone. On the medical device side, it links to medical meters and sensors. The reference platform serves as an electronic foundation for gateway builders to create their own flavors of in-home medical gateways.

The technology is targeted at three different kinds of users: younger patients who employ it for wellness maintenance; older patients who might use it for chronic disease management; and rural users who don't have easy access to doctors.

"The idea is that it's easier if you can just send your data to a record where a medical professional can look at it," Niewolny says. "It's a gateway solution, just like any other sort of networking gateway, but your sensor nodes are medical devices."

Niewolny notes that the information can be sent to data collection points where doctors can read it, or it may be stored for the patient's own personal use.

"The doctor is not going to look at every piece of data that's been collected. But there are a lot of good software engineers out there who will write algorithms to help the doctor decide which pieces of information they should be looking at and which pieces of information they shouldn't."

Freescale says the platform will cost $499 and will begin shipping early in 2012.

So far as I can tell, information on this dev board is either well-hidden or doesn't exist on the Freescale site. There are a number of interestintg kits, for example a gamers emotion reading dev kit... don't see this one or any info about it, only the HHH network.

Also, many of the wireless data transmission medical monitoring devices use proprietary communication encode/decode because Zigbee, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc, all require too much power or processing overhead.

Good point regarding the privacy issues. There's a great opportunity here for another smart software engineer to develop a program that looks for a different kind of red flag -- one that potentially finds a loophole for the health insurer.

The analytics portion of portable medical and fitness devices is actually a huge opportunity. Many of them have wi-fi capability, and can download data to PCs, which in turn can be sent to healthcare providers or insurance companies. The possibility of quanititative data feeding into medical studies and then into healthcare profiles and planning are enormously positive, if of course the privacy issues are appropriately handled.

Given that predictive analytics is a hot button these days, I would think once the medical device platforms are in it place, it will be no time before someone takes on this challenge and comes up with a variety of software solutions to this problem.

Yes, there can be wellness overkill. As Jenn points out, this could end up being a hypchondriac's dream. The flip side is that you needn't walk around with sensors on your body all day. If you have a bathroom scale with wireless access, it could send your daily weight. If you take your blood pressure once a week, that could be automatically sent. If there's a way to wirelessly send a blood sugar reading, that could be done, too. I don't think it needs to be obtrusive -- unless that's the way you want it. As our source pointed out, they're hoping that some smart software engineer could develop a program that looks for the red flags, so physicians don't have to pour over reams of paper to find the data they need. The point is, the data is now available. How patients and physicians handle it is up to them.

@Dr. Fdez: Points well noted and I am iin favor of practicing preventitive medicine vs. the way the system works now where we shell out big dollars on treatments and surgeries that caught have been avoided. And Alex makes a good point as well about emerging reference designs bringing the costs down on many of these systems.

My dad is a former surgeon and he was part of group at a hospital experimenting with electronic patient records and monitoring systems back in the early 90s and it was a nightmare. The systems were expensive and kludgy and the medical staff wanted no part of them because they were an inhibitor, not a facilitator, to workflow and productivity.

I get the point of feeling being monitored 24-7, but the idea behind all this development is that we need to change the way we are doing things. I have been a physician for more than a decade and people wait to go to see us when they already have a symptom, which is often too late and medical or surgical treatment is needed. If patients and physicians start changing more to a preventive medicine, rather than treatment oriented, a lot will be saved on health costs and the most important the health of the patient might be restored before it is too late.

We are used to track our weight more than we used to do in the past, also people without chronic and degenerative diseases track their heart rate while performing exercise and not only that we find now portable ECGs! There will be a day in which we all do this without feeling the burden of being “tracked”, physicians will also understand that it´s better to keep track of your patient than trying to put down fires and performing expensive and complicated surgeries along with expensive medical treatments to solve what would´ve just been a matter of lowering salt in diet, or doing more exercise.

I´d rather jog for 5 more minutes than having a cardiac bypass surgery J

I see your point, Beth - seems like a hypochondriac's dream. Although, monitoring like this could be a good thing in that it may keep people out of the doctor's offices by cutting down on unnecessary visits.

Points noted, Beth, but I think it's good to bring healthcare into the real where decisions can be based on quantitative information. In point of fact, the problem now is not that there's no data, it's that it can't be accessed. The stumbling block to electronic medical records is the high cost for implementation at the health provider (i.e. doctor) end. The systems cost at least $60k. As for the dev board discussed here, it's great to see reference designs emerging, which will make it easier for the design engineering community to target this growing market.

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